this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
107 points (96.5% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5289 readers
439 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Someone made a good point to me the other day on this though, the PHEV is the worst of both worlds because you lug around the wrought of the ICE engine, have to pay for a lifetime of maintenance with it and when electric, you have diminished range due to the weight of the ICE engine
PHEVs are lighter than every EV on the market of equivalent size.
Prius Prime is 3500lbs, while Nissan Leaf is 4000 and Model Y is like 4300.
EV batteries are the real waste when you actually measure how heavy the battery packs are. The engine + transmission system of ICE is far, far, far lighter.
More like the 800lbs of extra batteries you carry (and rarely use) are a waste on the full size EV. Like, how often are you running your battery down and using all 1000lbs of Li-ion effectively?
Yes, an Ioniq 6 is over 1000lbs of battery. Most engines are just a hundred or so lbs. You seriously can't make any kind of "weight" argument here, EVs are so heavy its not a reasonable comparison. Any weight argument immediately swings in favor of ICE, Hybrid, or PHEV.
The far lighter weight of the Prius (3200lbs) and Prius Prime (3500lbs) is one of the reasons why they have much better efficiency than their pure-EV competitors. And is likely a major influence on why they reached #1 on ACEEE's greenest car of the market list.
$35 an oil change x 15 oil changes == $525 over ~10 years of a car's usage. People are seriously overdramaticizing the costs of oil changes.
https://www.cartalk.com/extended-warranties/tesla-maintenance-cost
Meanwhile, a single Tesla 3 set of tires is like $1000, and because the weight of the vehicle, the tires wear out faster and spew microplastics everywhere.
And because Tesla vehicles have absurdly overpowered motors, people tend to wear out their tires faster.
Your response is just overflowing with odd takes...
You decided to zero in and fixate on weight alone? The conversation is weight along with range/efficiency, emissions and lifetime maintenance. Yes, some cars weigh less... which also means they have less electric range. You also think an American lobbying group is your shining example of integrity in their endorsement?
You focus in on tesla as your main example of EV maintenance - they are a known bad actor generally, in a walled garden that gouges cost for every single thing and lives near exclusively to cater to out-of-touch tech bro class and their families on corporate expense accounts.
"It's impossible to cook at home! Wagyu streak costs $4000 a pound!!!!"
No. I use ACEEE's numbers because they factor into:
https://greenercars.org/greenercars-ratings/how-we-determine-ratings/
https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars
And #1 vehicle after their analysis is the Prius Prime and Prius respectively. Weight is one factor, but there's other factors (such as Tesla's use of NCA chemistry for their Li-ion) that drops Tesla down severely compared to cleaner chemistries from other companies. But even when we look at the best EVs on the market for environmentalism (such as Nissan Leaf or Ioniq 5 or whatever...), the Prius reigns supreme from above.
Prius beats even well recognized brands and environmental cars like Nissan Leaf on ACEEE's study.
There are also cheap economy-cars / hybrids, such as the Toyota Corolla Hybrid and Accord Hybrid (not in the top 10, but still a score of >60) that are popular and green choices despite using gasoline as their primary transportation, because tailpipe emissions aren't the only environmental effect at play here. When Hybrid / ICE cars reach 50mpg (or high 40s, like the Accord Hybrid), tailpipe emissions start to matter less-and-less, and yes... weight of the car starts to matter more and more (particulates from tires wear becomes the #1 pollution factor on EVs). There's also significant issues with how dirty the mining industries are to make EVs (Lithium, Nickle, Cobalt, etc. etc.) And a lack of recycling today. Meanwhile, Steel is 90%+ recycled in the auto-industry, making for some of the most environmentally friendly manufacturing in practice.
There's a lot of little things that add up. EVs are not the silver-bullet that EV fans think they are, but I'm glad that EVs have brought efficiency to the forefront of the minds of people. But we need to think holistically: what is the best path forward that overall reduces pollution (including CO2) from our system?
The answer may surprise you, especially if you're one of the people tricked into the EV-only mindset. There's many other technologies that are competitive.
Say we proceed with the premise that the lobbying group you link is valid, you still share it there, black and white on your cited chart - 4 of the top 5 vehicles on their list, the vast majority, are EVs. You just have tunnel vision for the one outlier PHEV. I'm sure the Prius is fine AND I'd need to pay for maintenance on BOTH an ICE engine, related non-EV components and a full electric infrastructure for the life of that vehicle if I purchased it over an EV.
What's your line of work if I may ask?
Electrical engineer degree but I'm doing software now.
I'm not against EVs. I'm against y'all bad-mouthing PHEVs and Hybrids when they still constitute the top of the green lists with our current level of technology.
I recognize that better batteries are coming next year and soon Silicon or Sodium batteries will be even better after that. But tomorrow is not today. People making decisions need to make decisions based on today's level of technology.
If all the cars available today, the Prius Prime does the best job. And anyone who doesn't have enough money for Prius or a Leaf or other EV can go buy a Honda Accord Hybrid or Corolla Hybrid and feel good that they still got a top15 vehicle on the green lists.
Those ACEEE numbers are predicated on placing an economic cost on pollution. If you assign a larger price to the pollution, even the PHEV's fall right off the chart. The E in their name stands for "Economy". They're focus is framing clean as a function of the economy. In their model, you can kill a bunch more people and the price of pollution only goes up a little. They even say they've left that number constant since 1998. If you value pollution in a logarithmic scale that gets way worse as time goes on, it becomes obvious that the only acceptable vehicles are the ones that have negative pollution costs. Since we dont have vehicles that can remove pollution from the air, getting one that gets as close to zero is the best bet. Right now, EV's get the closest to zero.
weight doesn't really matter. Trains weigh a FUCKLOAD but are the most efficient means of travel simply because they don't stop once they start rolling, and are shaped such that they're not affected much by wind resistance.
Cars go fast enough that air resistance is a much greater contributing factor to their efficiency than weight is. In general cars are the problem regardless of their efficiency, because they're always going to be the worst choice for moving anything: they're useful because of their convenience.
So, since we can't get rid of cars, the best choice is to make their impact on our carbon problem as lessened as possible, and the best way to do that is to stop burning things to make them move.
No. The best way possible is to calculate the various effects of differentt fuel sources and make sure we choose the best one. ACEEE's calculations suggest that burning things (ie: Toyota Prius) remains the #2 best vehicle, only beaten by Prius Prime PHEV (partially plug-in electric + burning things).
Don't hate me, hate actual math and physics. https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars
Lighter weight, lower-polluting PHEVs can beat EVs (!!!) once we add up all the pollution events.
Therein lies your hubris. You think EVs are the best, but the math suggests otherwise. EVs can be pretty good, as long as you get a small battery pack (like Nissan Leaf) that minimizes the effects of dirty Li-ion mining, and avoid the dirtiest chemistries like NCA (Tesla has a score of 55 on ACEEE's green-list, meaning even a full ICE/Hybrid like 2024 Accord Hybrid's 62 rating is better than a Tesla).
A PHEV still has a battery. We're going to be doing that mining anyway. And we're definitely going to be using every single battery we can make. So, what's the point of burning fuels if you can do it all with batteries, which should continue to get better over time? It doesn't matter if EV's are slightly less efficient than a handful of PHEVS if they're using clean energy to charge. Once the lithium and rare earth minerals are mined they're recyclable, and their value over time will actually make it important to do so.
And, yet again, burning fuels has to stop. We need to stop putting sequestered carbon in the air. And no, switching the globe to "renewable carbon" via biomass isn't going to work.
Yes. And a 13.6kW-hr battery (like in the Prius Prime) has 1/6th of the rare-earth metals found in the Tesla 80kW-hr batteries.
Because current battery technology is so dirty that it wipes out the gains you made from avoiding fossil fuels.
When the Silicon-Batteries and/or Sodium Batteries appear two years from now, I'll re-evaluate. But today, PHEV is cleaner.
https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars
Proof is in the pudding. Prius Prime, after accounting for "lifetime" emissions (which include the incredibly dirty mining process behind mining 80kW-hr worth of batteries instead of 13.6kW-hr), is far more efficient and environmentally friendly than a large number of EVs. Even EVs with small battery packs like the 40kW-hr Nissan Leaf
The issue with say, larger Tesla-like vehicles is that their battery packs are too big, too heavy, too redundant, and cause too much pollution during manufacturing. A Prius Prime has ~70% electrification in practice / 30% ICE, and the 30% ICE part is at over 50mpg. Once all the math / weight / costs / environmental effects are added up, the 800+lbs of extra Li-ion batteries from Tesla (and even smaller say ~500lb battery packs from Nissan Leaf) will easily out-pollute the miniscule amount of gasoline the Prius prime uses.
We need to re-evaluate EVs as different battery packs come out. LFP is much less pollution, but its also much less kw-hr and thus heavier per energy.
Their formula for calculating greenness drastically underestimates the impact of carbon emissions. That's the only reason there's a PHEV at the top of the list.
With all due respect, I think I'll take ACEEE's word over yours with regards to the environmental costs of NOx, CO2, PM, and other pollutants.
What do you know of the funding of ACEEE?
https://www.aceee.org/aceee-ally-program
Not a single car company, if that's what you're going for. State of California Energy Commission is one of the bigger contributors.